Pamela Brann had a gambling problem, ringing up more than $300,000 in losses visiting Kansas City’s riverboat casinos.

But in a lawsuit, the Pleasant Hill, Mo., woman says her “unstoppable desire to gamble” could be blamed on Mirapex, a drug originally designed to combat Parkinson’s disease that she took from 2002 to 2007 to treat restless leg syndrome.

She’s not alone. Hundreds of similar suits have been filed nationwide, with more than 400 of them pooled in federal court in Minnesota. Most settled after a 2008 bellwether trial there ended in an $8.2 million verdict for the plaintiff.

The lawsuits say Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., Pfizer Inc. and other drug companies that developed and marketed Mirapex should have known it affected the brain in ways that could cause compulsive behaviors.

But Brann isn’t suing just the drug companies. Her suit also targets the casinos, saying that they should have known of the drug’s effects and that they unfairly benefited from her use of it.

Defense attorneys smell an attempt to steer the case to a jury in Jackson County, which many view as plaintiff-friendly, by targeting local companies. The casinos, unlike the drug companies, are Missouri corporations.

Brann’s attorneys at Humphrey Farrington & McClain PC in Independence could not be reached for comment.

An earlier lawsuit by Brann was transferred to Minnesota, but she withdrew it before filing her latest complaint in Jackson County Circuit Court in October. On Dec. 1, the drug companies, which Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice LLC and Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP defend locally, moved the suit into federal court.

In a Dec. 2 motion to dismiss the casinos from Brann’s suit, Tormohlen wrote that if the pharmaceutical companies hid the dangers of Mirapex from consumers, casinos would have no way of knowing of them, either.